CHAPTER THREE
Ada
I got him alone in the gallery behind the stage, where the caterers stacked empty magnums and the noise of the party came through the wall like surf.
“Tell me it’s a marketing decision.”
He didn’t startle. That was the worst part. He turned with a flute of champagne in his hand and looked at me the way he looked at a line item.
“Ada. You shouldn’t be back here.”
“Tell me,” I said, and my voice was steadier than I had any right to expect, “that you put Chloe’s face on my work because it tests better.
Tell me it’s a lie for the cameras and tonight you’ll come home and it’ll be ours again.
Tell me that, Sebastian, and I’ll believe you, because god help me I still want to. ”
Something moved behind the grey eyes. For one heartbeat I thought I’d reached him.
Then he set the flute down with a click that sounded very final.
“The brand needs a story people can fall in love with,” he said. “A face. A name that means something.”
“I’m your wife.”
“You’re a chemist.” He said it gently, which made it obscene.
“A brilliant one. No one is taking that from you. But Chloe photographs like a dream and her family opens doors in Paris that yours never could, and this is four hundred million dollars, Ada. I can’t hang it on a girl who came out of a rented lab in a city no one remembers. ”
The room went very quiet and very cold.
“Say the rest of it,” I whispered. “You’re already halfway. Say it.”
His jaw tightened. The scar through his brow went white.
“You married up,” Sebastian Vale said. “Everyone knows it but you. You’re a lovely, talented girl who got very lucky, and somewhere along the way you started believing the Vale name was yours.
It isn’t. It never was. Without it you’re a nose in a white coat, and you’d do well to remember that before you make a scene in front of my board. ”
I had imagined, in two years of small cruelties, that there was a bottom to how much a person could hurt me.
There wasn’t. It just kept opening, like a trapdoor over a trapdoor over the dark.
My hand was inside my clutch. My fingers found the fold of tissue, the sharp cheap edges of the test, the two pink lines that made three of us standing in that room.
Tell him, said the girl in the jasmine. Tell him and watch his face change. Tell him and he’ll fall to his knees and it will all have been a nightmare.
I looked at my husband (at the beautiful stranger kissing another woman’s knuckles on the far side of a wall), and I understood that if I told him now, he would not fall to his knees.
He would take it.
He would fold this child into the machine the way he’d folded me, name it, brand it, credit someone else with the making of it, and I would spend the rest of my life a lovely blank in the corner of its photographs.
Over my dead body.
I took my hand out of the clutch, empty.
“You’re right,” I said, and I watched relief flicker across his face: relief, that I was going to be reasonable. “The Vale name was never mine.”
I slid my wedding ring off my finger. It came away easily; I’d lost weight I hadn’t noticed losing. I set it on the stacked magnums between us, where the light caught it once and let it go.
“Keep it,” I said. “You’ll want it back for the next girl who photographs well.”
“Ada—”
“Goodbye, Sebastian.”
I walked out through the service corridor, past the twenty-second floor and my secret kingdom and the mother bottle of éternel breathing sandalwood and jasmine into an empty room, and I did not cry until the car was three streets away.
By the time it reached the airport, I had stopped.
I never cried over Sebastian Vale again.
But he was going to cry over me. He just had four years and one grey-eyed little boy left before he learned it.